PilBox – Building Mobile Apps in PicoLisp

&gt; An Adroid SDK project is a monster. Here, on my installation, the &quot;PilBox&#x2F;&quot; folder contains more than ten thousand files!<p>It&#x27;s sad when a clean slate project for a platform created when we should have known better decades ago still ends up with this kind of overhead.<p>It perfectly matches my recollection of doing Android development too: a big uncontrollable mess of different kinds of files whose inter-dependencies and relations are completely opaque.

Another good option if you want to write Android apps in Lisp is lein-droid [1] which allows you to use Clojure on Android. This means you can use any standard Android API, library or SDK in your app without additional bridge components.<p>The initial build &amp; deploy times for Clojure on Android are annoying, but using a REPL to edit your Android app dynamically is amazing.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;clojure-android&#x2F;lein-droid" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;clojure-android&#x2F;lein-droid</a>

I have been following the dev of PicoLisp for a long time; Alexander is great. He keeps going strong for decades. He keeps the PicoLisp platform going with additions like this. Impressive.

I&#x27;m still super shocked that Google doesn&#x27;t expend more effort to get more languages running on Android.<p>It feels like a no-brainer for them to want straightforward usage with, say, Python. Is it really a performance thing?

From looking at the the Java files in the linked tarball as well as the documentation[1], it seems that PicoLisp calls Java by sending serialized messages through pipes from a separate processes and then invokes the Java reflection APIs.<p>So trying to use this to build an Android app with the native (i.e. Java) Android UI libraries probably wouldn&#x27;t work too well, right?<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;picolisp.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;?javacode" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;picolisp.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;?javacode</a>

Always good to see PicoLisp on HN.